The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

 The new Russell Banks novel is an epic history of our times. Our times move fast. So an epic novel need not cover a multi-generational timeline of slow change. 

In The Magic Kingdom the sweeping change of times and physical landscape is shown in the environment of a single lifetime of one man.   

The character and first person narrator of the story is Harley Mann, an 82 years old resident of St. Cloud Florida. He was born in 1890. 
The set up of the novel is that in 1972 he recorded, on reel to reel tapes, the story of the first 20 or so years of his life. It is a very unusual story and life. 

He is the child of a family who lived in the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee and later in Waycross Georgia. These were designed to be utopian examples of how we could live in a more cooperative socialist structure.    
After the death of his father, child Harley moves with his mother, his twin brother, his other set of twin brothers, and baby sister to a dismal sort of plantation that is more or less a prison including overseers with bullwhips. 
It’s the system of indentured slavery where one can never work off the debt owed to the master of the place, a strange little rich man who lives in a mansion on the grounds. 

This family is rescued by a man who is the head of a Shaker community in the Florida Everglades. Elder John buys off the family debt and takes them to the New Bethany colony when Harley is around 11 and the story moves on from there. 

Early on in the novel Banks shows us a part of the history of the USA which is little known and actually not the kind of thing that our mainstream goes out of it way to show us, being more inclined to celebrate capitalism over socialist cooperative systems as if capitalism and the business community is really the only American Way.  The bulk of the story takes place in New Betheny and the nearby city of St Cloud. Although a mere 110 or so years ago the area was almost pioneer territory for these white oddball utopian Christian characters, the seminole people having been killed off or otherwise removed not that long before.    

Harley and family, coming from the Ruskin experience, are secular whereas the Shakers are very religious, although both the secular and neo-Christians want to live in a cooperative economic system. This is another instructive aspect of this fine novel. The reader gets a certain amount of information about what the Shakers were all about. We learn that the Shakers believed in Christ but also a woman who was an 18th Century founder of the sect and brought them from England to New York State. She established the Shaker celibacy. Though long dead she, Mother Ann Lee, is worshiped along with Christ. In The Magic Kingdom the Shakers colony can only survive via recruitment, being unable to reproduce new Shakers via bringing their own children into the religion. Although not clearly stated, that is the reason that Elder John rescued Harley and family from the plantation. These five children learn to become Shakers. They are free to accept the doctrine when they come of age, confess to the elder or woman elder. and then be Shakers and continue the colony. Or go elsewhere, live in The World.   

The Shakers reject profit from usury. But people are surrounded by economic challenges which can make their Biblical moral foundations sometimes on ground with sinkholes.    

The emotional heart of the story is an odd love that Harley finds and comes to cherish. The Magic Kingdom is a love story. A story of what humans will do for love, be it something justifiable or not, as a young man follows his heart.   

The core of the novel is this love and shame in a restrictive community. It is not at all a didactic slog about religious and cooperative communities.
It’s an involving page turner, a gripping story of a young man’s love.

All in the land of the corporate Magic Kingdom of Disney World only a few decades later.

Russell Banks remains one of our greatest novelist.